The catalogue raisonné The Non-Statistical Body, offering a comprehensive overview of Chan Sook Choi’s oeuvre, will be published by DISTANZ Verlag in October 2025. Recognized as one of the leading figures in contemporary Korean art, Choi works between Seoul and Germany across media, film, and installation. Her acclaimed work qbit to adam received the Korean Artist Prize from the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.
The release will be marked by an international forum and screening in Seoul and Berlin, featuring contributions from the catalogue’s authors. Zoe Chun, independent curator and director of The Great Commission, will moderate the event, which will include presentations by Siegfried Zielinski, Sooyon Lee, Jesi Khadivi, and Yung Bin Kwak, and a tribute to Hyeok Cho’s essay.
The title The Non-Statistical Body draws on a concept articulated by media theorist Siegfried Zielinski to describe Choi’s work: bodies that resist quantification, normalization, and reduction to averages—affirming singularity, exception, and expanded existence. Through her practice, Choi challenges standardized models of humans, proposing that beings are multifaceted, rhythmic, and layered with memory and sensation. This catalogue affirms the irreducible uniqueness and unpredictability of each life trajectory.
The catalogue also presents Choi’s narrative experiments that intertwine physical movement and mental migration, using interdisciplinary methods to address contemporary social issues. It highlights her attention to the traces of fragile beings—those displaced, overlooked, or silenced—and her efforts to map their trajectories and articulate their existential conditions. By deconstructing histories often treated as fixed, Choi translates local voices into phenomenological terrains where poetry, song, image, text, and sound reframe events as hyper-subjective realities in which fiction and documentary converge. The Non-Statistical Body positions her methodology as reimagining history and lived experience through critical inquiry and poetic testimony.
Chan Sook Choi is a Berlin- and Seoul-based artist and artistic researcher whose practice spans media, film, and installation. Her work engages displacement, memory, and migration, transforming overlooked voices into layered forms that connect the intimate with the geopolitical. Through images, sound, and text, she creates environments in which history is reconfigured with sensitivity and where fiction and documentary converge.
Selected solo exhibitions include Künstlerhaus Bremen (2025), the Berlinische Galerie IBB Video Space (2024), Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2017), and the Digital Art Center Taipei (2010). She has also participated in major group exhibitions at the Asia Culture Center, M+, and ZKM (2025), the Nam June Paik Art Center (2024), and the Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2023). Awards include the German Federal Kunstfond Visual Arts Fellowship (2021), the Korean Artist Prize, and the Korean Order of Cultural Merit (2022), among others.
Contact: The Great Commission (Curator: Zoe Chun)
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